> 1 / I have been told by two large storage vendors that they "cherry
> pick" the best SATA drives for their Enterprise Disk Arrays. You can
> read this in various ways, I take it to mean that while hard-drives past
> testing to be sold, they are not all equal (similar to testing and speed
> rating CPU's)
Any enterprise-level vendor worth their weight will perform some serious
burn-in tests on systems they sell. We use cerberus
(http://freshmeat.net/projects/ctcs/) and burn for no less than 24 hours
(usually 2-3 days). It's extremely rare than anything will pass
through burn-in and then fail in the field under normal use.
The other thing to consider is that with drives, they usually go bad in
lots. So when we get a bad drive, we usually go through and do extra
testing on all of the other drives from that lot (since about half the
time, there's something bad in the whole lot).
-Chris